Thursday, November 16, 2017

Not in defense of Mugabe but...

I would like to remember the Robert Mugabe I knew (from afar) as I was growing up.  Robert Mugabe has an appeal not that different from that of Nelson Mandela for my leftist generation in the Middle East.  Mugabe was a brilliant student who persevered in a grotesque racist system of white minority rule in Rhodesia.  People have forgotten by now the nastiness of the regime of Ian Smith and how it was sponsored by Western government.  After completing his education in many fields and adding to it through correspondence education, Mugabe led the movement of ZANU. This is the Mugabe that I remember: the principled and defiant leader of liberation struggle who supported Arab struggle for independence and who supported Palestinian resistance (and received aid from it too).  Mugabe is a man who led the struggle for independence against two evil twin system of colonization: local and external.  This was all before Mugabe became a leader of a country--not a virtuous or able leader but a leader nevertheless.  Yet, the Western media coverage of the man was more like a caricature of him: and don't sell me the fake notions of Western outrage agent his tyranny: Western leaders go one-by-one and prostrate, literally, before every Gulf despot and you think that you rhetoric of outrage against Mugabe will stick?  You think that corruption of the Mugabe is worse than the corruption of US puppet deposit in the Middle East region?  Mugabe also championed the poor and was adamant about health care for all in Zimbabwe when 40 million remain without health care in the US.  But the nasty (and disproportionate) Western media coverage of Mugabe is partly directed against his measures against white settlers who sole lands that didnot belong to him. He was not "magnanimous" like Mandela who was more than happy to apply pure unjust Western capitalism in South Africa.